Battle Hill Bolero

by Daniel José Older

  There should be hordes and hordes of those lost souls clambering around me like obsessive fans, their fragile, ghostly fingers clawing for some scrap of life. A glint in the distance catches my eye: Botus and his men. I run, try to ignore the icky, warm kiss of Hell’s heavy breeze, run harder.

  The shimmering forms disappear behind a building. In the far distance, I see the Underworld’s ghosty answer to the Brooklyn Clocktower, and, closer, the malformed trees of Prospect Park.

  And I know where they’re headed. My smile remains. I try to pace myself—don’t want to be winded while I cut them down—but everything in me is a relentless engine pushing forward to the kill.

  The Prospect Park entrada is a smudge of empty space beneath a copse of sorry-looking trees. The air around it crackles and simmers; I’m sure they’ve just gone through. I barrel toward it so unthinkingly, stupidly, you could even say, I almost miss the ’catcher they’ve stationed behind it.

  Almost.

  He swings out, battle-axe first, from the edge of the entrada just as I’m stepping through. I don’t bother cutting my momentum, just adjust my body slightly as I enter and raise the blade to meet his attack. Solid steel clangs against ghost steel at the exact point of neither-here-nor-there, the point that is, essentially, me.

  Something shoves my whole body backward, and I land in a snowbank a few feet away from the entrada. I’m up; my hands still clutch these blades, and after a wary glance at the shimmering gateway, I’m out. The soulcatcher seems to have opted to stay safely on the other side, and I don’t have time to work out whatever necromantic reaction we ignited back there. The fresh, chilly air of the living world fills me, and I remember how badly I want to keep living, how beautiful life is even amidst death, ongoing, relentless death. Icicles dangle from snow-covered branches, catch the winking shine of street lamps. Galaxies stretch above us, beyond the great gray clouds. The air tastes like oncoming snow.

  Kill, rages the engine within. End this.

  I cross the park, an unstoppable blur of motion, crooked and fluid and perfect and deadly. Launch myself over the fence, because walking out through the regular park entrance is for losers, and sprint through the roundabout, dodge passing cars, ignore memories of passing near here with Sasha once upon a time—not thinking about the babies, not thinking about the babies—then hurl down Prospect Park South, past cozy little shops and bakeries and the cheerful sparkle of holiday decorations.

  There. At the end of the block. I’ve reduced the chairman’s retinue to two.

  Something booms through the air: my best friend’s voice, rising above the thunder of a thousand spirits chanting as one, concussing the winter sky with their rage.

  I can’t make out what they’re saying, but I sing along anyway as I run.

  Botus is heading for the battlefield—a wise calculation: with me after him, he’ll be safer in a war zone. He won’t make it, though.

  The three spirits cut a hard right down a quiet block. A few dots of white speckle the murky sky. Then hundreds more. A fine sheet of it already covers the street by the time they reach the cemetery wall and launch into the air. My blade leaves my hand with a whisper. Before it finds its mark, I hurl the dagger.

  “NO! MORE!” the rebel armies chant. “NO! MORE!”

  The first ’catcher collapses, and I’m on him, retrieving my blade as the second lands, clutching his arm and scrambling to draw his blade. I finish him with a single downward thrust, then climb onto the roof of an SUV and hurdle the cemetery fence.

  I land on a snowy, tombstone-strewn hillside. Botus scrambles toward the summit, twenty feet ahead of me. Desperate cries and the clang of ghost blades fill the air, and all the while the chant churns on: “NO! MORE! NO! MORE!” Another melody laces through it now, rising up from some other part of the battlefield.

  Botus pauses at the top of the hill, panting.

  He turns, blade drawn, then hurls out of the way as my dagger whizzes past him. He rises, deflecting my downswing and shoving me away from him. “You don’t want this, Delacruz. Your men need you right now. Would be a shame to die in sight of your own army’s defeat.”

  “Indeed it would.” I fall on him, swinging wildly, and savor the panic in his eyes. “James and Sarah Raymond.” My blade slices his forearm, and Botus hollers, blocks my next few cuts, and then counterattacks with an off-balance upswing.

  “Jane and Reginald Raymond.” I carve a nice chunk from his thigh as he stumbles past me. Riley’s voice rises over the approaching din of warfare, but I can’t make out what he’s saying. Something about a lock. Lock them?

  “Don’t do this, Carlos,” Botus rasps, his breath coming heavy now.

  My smile goes on, but a tremendous sob wells up in my throat.

  “Darren Raymond. Aisha Flores.” He blocks the first cut and catches my dagger swipe across his belly, drops to his knees.

  “NO! MORE! NO! MORE!” the night sings around me. I’m vaguely aware of a battle raging at the foot of the hill. More yells and clanging. Not my concern at the moment.

  “Leandro Reynaldo Salazar.” My blade enters his shoulder, and he screams. I pull it out. Ram it into the other side. “Dulce Maria Aviles.” Tears pour down my face.

  “Carlos! No!”

  “NO! MORE! NO! MORE!”

  “Andre Salazar.” I slice his face as he crumbles. “Trevor Brass.”

  “Carlos!”

  “Mama Esther.”

  His moans become gurgles; his body flickers. Then he’s gone.

  Below me, the battle rages on amidst tombstones and crypts. It stretches for miles and miles around me, an ongoing melee that’s impossible to decipher at a glance. And a glance is all I have: the clashing troops at the foot of the hill clamber closer and closer. It wasn’t “Lock them!” Riley was yelling; it was “Block them!” An interception command. The Council must’ve had a squad heading my way, and Riley deployed these guys—it looks like some of those bicycle ghosts, judging by their gear—to rush over and hold them off so I could do what I had to do.

  It’s not going well for them now, from the look of things. The Council goons outnumber them two to one, and the cycle ghosts are hemmed into a tight circle, lashing out as they retreat up the hill toward me. Beyond the throng of ’catchers, though, it’s anyone’s guess who controls the battlefield, but one thing is clear: there are way more of them than there are of us. The snow is coming down in earnest now, great sweeping heaps of it lashing across the hillside and through the grappling foes.

  “Your chairman is dead!” I holler. “Your forces are being routed.” I move a few steps down the slope. The ’catchers eye me, their blades leveled at the cyclists. We need to pull back, hold the higher ground, and try to get reinforced, and I’m about to get up in the cyclists’ midst and tell them when one yells “Charge!” and rushes forward. The rest follow, and, cursing, so do I.

  The ’catchers cut down three outright—it’s not even a fight, just slaughter. The rest of us end up, more by chance and sheer terror than any strategy, bum-rushing the center of their line in one desperate burst and breaking it. Four or five ’catchers get trampled and sliced as we clutter through. The rest close in, and then our diminishing squad stands back to back with each other, cutting outward to hold them off.

  Two more cyclists drop before a group of Black Hoodies falls on the ’catchers en masse, shredding them. I didn’t even see them coming—the cats just seemed to drop out of the sky, blades cleaving away as they smashed the Council line from the side and swept them away. Before we can thank them, they’re gone. The cyclists, to their credit, dive back into the battle, untrained and shattered.

  I shove toward the thick of things, blocking, swiping, dodging as I move. There’s too much chaos for anyone to bother targeting me specifically—everyone around is just trying to stay alive. A tall, lanky ’catcher gets up in my face, swinging wildly. I parry twi
ce, and then she’s clobbered from behind by some phantom from 17. The 17ers rush past and then scatter as a throng haint emerges from the shadows of an old willow tree. It bellows with all those goddamn mouths and shreds two of our guys in seconds.

  At first I think it’s that huge one from my apartment, but then I realize they’re all huge now. They’ve been feeding. The throng haint hurls its chain out, entangling three 17ers and dragging them slowly back to its heaving girth. The rest swarm in to fight it off, but those chains won’t be broken, and four are clobbered trying to unwrap their buddies. Some troops from 4 come up behind it, and I join them. We carve away as the thing howls and swings around. Two of the captured 17ers manage to free themselves in the melee, and then a squad of ’catchers shows up and we’re all clanging steel to steel and trying to stay out of the way of those chains and claws.

  “SOLDIERS OF THE REVOLUTION!” Riley’s voice is hoarse but firm. “PULL BACK! CONVERGE AT THE SUMMIT OF BATTLE!”

  The ’catchers give a collective whoop of joy and press their offense harder. Cleaving two of ours as they rush our ranks. It’s made them sloppy, though, and when Saeen appears with a battle-axe already swinging, she and I drop six of them before they can regroup and pull back.

  “You heard the commander!” Saeen hollers. “Uphill. Retreat is not defeat!”

  “Retreat is not defeat!” the 4s scream. “Retreat is not defeat!”

  It’s an awkward kind of rallying cry, but pretty soon it’s spread, and I get it—these troops face atrocious odds and have barely been a full army for an hour. Anything that will keep us from shattering will do, any form of loose unity. Unity is really all we got.

  Saeen and I put the top of the hill behind us and work our way backward. Her troops spread out around us, a few 17ers mixed in, and hold back the last lackluster assaults from the ’catchers. In front of us, the whole Council army begins to congeal as our troops pull back from its ranks.

  It’s a terrifying sight.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Krys

  Don’t get me wrong: Hell is hell.

  And it’s dank and stank and corroded by decay and the endless, dizzying sense of spiraling forever downward. Endlessly, all those torqued-up buildings and trees and hills just seem to seep toward some impossible inner heart of the world. Nothing ever stays perfectly still—that fuckass ethereal wind blows forever—but the stillness of death pervades everything.

  It’s annoying.

  But!

  There’s something to be said for being in a place that’s for you, about you, of you, after all this physical, living-people-world shit. I lean down and pick up a rock. It’s a dead rock, a rock of the Underworld, and it fits easily into my hand. It feels right. No concentration required, no skill. I don’t have to throw my entire attention into the edges of my being, don’t have to think about it at all, in fact. The rock is dead like me. We one.

  I look at Redd, and Redd unleashes that wily smile, and I feel it in my gut—it’s a smile I could live off for several days, a full meal. Then I hurl the rock as hard as I can.

  It bounces off the back of one of the mangy hounds that’s turned away from us, harassing a pathetic, trembling group of very old, very decayed spirits. It yelps, skittering forward, then turns. Snarls. The others turn too.

  We run.

  Yelps and growls rise up around us as we hurl back to the pen we’d freed the hounds from—what was it, an hour ago? Three? Time gets fuzzy downstairs—whenever we first breached through to Hell.

  Mama Esther’s books seemed to chart a pretty clear path at first. There were the hellhounds, explicitly described, anatomized, charted, and explained. There they were on the map, penned off from the rest of the dead in a little fenced-in area in a far corner of what in the living world is Prospect Park, and in the Underworld is a vast expanse of eerie wasteland, punctuated by some jacked-up helltrees and populated by thousands of equally jacked-up old lost souls, gargling and gagging along endlessly.

  At least, it was until Redd and I showed up an unknown amount of time ago and released the hellhounds. I mean, in retrospect, we coulda thought harder about that decision, but everything Mama Esther left seemed to point us right to that gate, and it’s like, when you get to a gate and it’s closed: open it. Right? So we did, laughing all along. Don’t even know what we were laughing about; everything has just felt so beautiful and terrible since we found fire in each other’s arms last night. At dawn, I slung Greta across my back and loaded up a full clip in my pistol, handed some explosives to Redd, and together we strolled out of the Iyawo’s room (both she and Jimmy snoring contentedly) and straight to the park and through the entrada.

  The hellhounds blew out the gate like they’d been waiting all their ghostly lives for that moment. They made straight for the lost souls, and within a few minutes they’d corralled those sad, drooping motherfuckers off to the far edge of the wastelands. There’s only about two dozen of the little monsters, so this whole sheepdog shit is impressive as hell, to be honest. Plus they’re all misshapen by tumors and open wounds and extra limbs. As Redd pointed out, it’s easy to see how some mortal mighta wandered down here a few millennia ago, gotten snarled at by a few of these guys, and left talking about a three-headed dog guarding the Underworld.

  And now they’re on our heels, but it’s like a game. It’s not that they couldn’t hurt us. Those phantom teeth and claws will do real damage if they catch up, but . . . the combined cocktail of rage, grief, and whatever this is I feel with Redd has endowed us with a kind of dizzy invincibility. I feel like I could take on a full squad of soulcatchers right now and walk away unbothered. Which reminds me: Where the hell are the soulcatchers? On a normal day, we’da seen at least a few patrolling around this opening area by now. Certainly there’d be a few minding the gate to the hellhound pen, so no one does exactly what we just did.

  Redd and I zip through the gate and slam it behind us as the hellhounds clamor against it, slobbering and gasping.

  “Now what?” Redd pants, and I want to tackle him and make love here in the den, because why the fuck not? But there’s work to do. It’s moving through me, eclipsing all the bliss of this hot new thing and the wild freedom of a ’catcherless Hell.

  “We gotta find the battlefield, I think. They’ve probably started fighting.”

  Redd nods, all business now. “You think they’d come direct at the HQ?”

  I think for a moment, trying to picture the assault. “Doubt it, unless they’ve gotten hold of some kind of siege technology we don’t know about. Nah. More likely they lured them out somewhere.”

  “And dem?” Redd nods at the hounds, who’ve given up trying to bust back into their own den and are instead chasing each other playfully, pouncing and nipping at each other’s ears. They look like puppies. Mangled, mutant, hell puppies.

  “We gotta make friends with ’em. Whatever they’re for, Mama Esther seemed to have a plan for ’em. So they come with us, wherever we end up.”

  Redd squints in thought, moves his mouth around his face like he’s chewing something sour and delicious. “Ay. Surely they gotta have some food ’round here, right? Nothing makes a dog a friend like feeding his ass.”

  The hellhound pen is just an enclosed area of the wasteland, the ground a spongy expanse of pebbles and dirt. At the far end, a small structure juts out from the fence, a guardhouse of some kind, I figure. We head for it, bust in, weapons drawn, but it’s unguarded like the rest of Hell. There’s feed, though, bags and bags and bags of it. We return, a heavy sack on each shoulder. The hounds have stopped playing and stand fully alert when we stroll in, mangled ears perked up, noises pointed. Redd pops the lock and swings the gate open, and we empty the bags into a mountain of feed as the monsters swarm.

  Twenty minutes later, or whatever that would be in helltime, we move as one, vicious pack, through the wilds of the Underworld, unchecked and unstoppable.
I lead us toward Sunset Park, because we might as well start there, plus I’ve heard rumors about a secret entrada in the basement of Council headquarters and I wanna know if it’s true.

  About halfway there, the hellhounds break out into a gallop ahead of us, howling and barking at the empty sky. The whole world feels like it’s rising in pitch, like so many moments have led to this one, like we’re sliding through an unstoppable sieve straight into the maw of history. Or maybe it’s all in my head. All I know is, this beautiful man struts beside me and together we can do anything, shatter the planet, unravel these years of hate, build something brand-new in each other’s arms and between each other’s thighs.

  The hellhounds erupt into a chorus of furious barking; they’re downright losing their little mutant minds over something just past the next hill. I swing Greta into position and flick off the safety. Redd heaves his axe onto his shoulder. It’s then that I realize where we must be: Green-Wood Cemetery, in the living-world Brooklyn. Nowhere else I know of is this hilly.

  A few things click in my mind at once, but I don’t have time to think any of them through, because something huge rises over the horizon in front of us, and I’m trying to aim at it through the sudden glint of light and all I hear is laughter.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sasha

  Yes, “Retreat is not defeat” sounds pretty, but if we’re not careful that is exactly what the hell retreat will turn into. I’d been wondering when Riley was gonna pull us back. He was smart to ride the momentum of that semi-surprise into a head-on attack, even with those abysmal numbers. But we also held the upper ground, and it soon became clear that was about all we had going for us, besides the wily ruggedness of a ragtag rebellion. And that’s not quite enough to win.

  I’ve been fighting alongside Kaya Doxtator, of the Oneida Nation, for the past hour. Her partner, Breyla Phan, had fallen in the initial assault. The troops of RD 7 fought with unbridled ferocity after losing one of their captains. With Vincent Jackson’s Black Hoodies at our side, we pushed deep into the Council lines, crushing wave after wave of ’catcher squads that threw themselves in our path. But eventually we’d pushed too hard, and lost a third of our numbers along the way. As the momentum and wrath waned, we found ourselves deep in the thick of the enemy, surrounded and with no path back—the Council had closed ranks behind us.